16th – 20th March 2014 

Once again we were enthused about travelling further into the middle east. The Kurdish wedding and all of the friendly people we had met whilst we had been in Iraq had made our recent upset evaporate completely. We felt positive that we could do this, we could get into Iran and across Pakistan, come what may and as if by magic, and in true PMA form, when we returned to the hotel after the wedding we found an email from Iran. The email that we had been waiting for for several months, the one that confirmed that it MAY be possible for us to visit with our van after all!

It seemed our luck was finally beginning to turn.
We spent the rest of the weekend calling around embassies and trying to tie someone down to give us an authorisation code so that the three of us (Alex, Peggy and I) could enter Iran. We worked all day but got nowhere fast, we made appointments to see people at the embassies for the following days and made arrangements to have dinner with Afooki and Haidar to say our sad goodbyes.

Great friends, great memories.

The hardest part of this adventure is leaving every new friend we ever meet. It was especially hard with Afooki and Haidar. They had done so much for us, they had opened up our minds and made our visiting their beguiling country a possibility, a possibility that we had never dreamed of.

We left the following morning and hit the embassies hard, we had been working on getting into Iran for 5 months by this time and were sure we had cracked it…only to be turned away once again. It was no good, we could not get our hands on the all important authorisation code that we so desperately needed. Our last hope scuppered we had no choice but to turn on our heels and head back across Kurdistan and back into Turkey.

We had 6 days left on our Turkish visa’s and it was just enough time to drive the 600 kilometers to Georgia. Our luck hadn’t turned at all, it was so frustrating, going back on ourselves is our biggest disappointment on the road , it wastes time, energy and money but there was nothing we could do, we had definitely exhausted all other options. We turned tails and set off back the way we had come, or so we thought until we stumbled upon a check point that definitely wasn’t going to let us through.

We had wandered somehow onto the road to Mosul, a city that was currently under attack from the now widely known ISIS, little did we know that at this time that tensions had been building for a while and it was all about to come to a head.
The Kurdish army did their jobs well and made our protection a serious matter. We were turned back to a safer route and told on no uncertain terms that we must not visit Mosul because of the terrorists.

The scariest part of it all was that we had no idea and had passed very close to Mosul on our way into Erbil, there are very few major roads in the country and signage is sometimes only in Kurdish so we had to pretty much wing it. Alex of course shrugged it all off until we got to the border crossing with Turkey the next day and were rushed through what seemed to be a mass exodus.

We sat in a traffic jam of cars filled to the rafters of family and possessions for 3 hours to get signed out of Iraq and once we had crossed the bridge and were officially on Turkish soil, we were rushed through and into a massive X-ray machine and then through 4 different sniffer dog stations, they obviously didn’t buy our tourist story!

6 hours later we were both relieved to be out of there but had no time to reflect and enjoy it, we had a 600km drive ahead of us and it was already late. We zipped through incredible scenery on our way to Lake Van, it can only be described as similar to the bottom of the ocean. Coal black sand in perfectly domed hills undulated as far as the eye could see and we were impressed at the grass around the edges trying to regain a grip on the land it may once have had.

We got royally lost in Sirnak and ended up on a mountain pass way into the night, or so it seemed, we eventually found a flat place to park for the night and fell asleep by 9pm!

The drive the following day was truly one of the most beautiful drives of the entire trip. Snow capped mountains with jagged peaks and smooth rolling hills of brown, red and sandy earth whizzed by us as we sped along. Lake Van was more than we could have ever imagined, the only word for it is EPIC. There aren’t words that can describe it really, so the pictures will have to do!

We gawped at the lake for as long as we dare, topped up on fuel and food in Tatvan and set off into the mountains to get a little closer to the Georgian border before nightfall.

Our last day of driving in Turkey was so bizarre, so may kinds of scenery over so few miles. We emerged from the snow tipped mountains and found ourselves in a desert gorge, sandy walls reached the sky to one side of us and a river ran along our other side with a wall of mountain keeping its path. This continued for around 250 km and then without warning the sand disappeared and we found ourselves in what seemed to be a cloud forest.

Can you see the sheep?

Can you see them now?

How about now? Come for your close up Sheeps.

Mist surrounded us and the ground came alive around us. We climbed until we were in the clouds and the mist turned into torrential rain. Suddenly we were surrounded by spring-like succulent greens full of hope, opportunity and life. The rain formed waterfalls down the steep embankments and rivulets ran across the road in front of us. Fertile meadows and bright green leaves dripping with heavy drops were everywhere we looked.  The roads wound round and round, hairpins at every other corner but I couldn’t take my eyes off the scenery, it was like Jurassic park with the odd house thrown in, the houses were wooden and old and spooky looking, probably thanks to the eerie weather but it was incredible how different it was from mere miles ago!

Darkness soon fell and we couldn’t see anything but the lights of the other cars on the road. We made it to the border crossing in the black torrential rain and it took an hour to cross. We had driven hundreds of miles over the last few days and just needed somewhere to park for the night. We had made it into Georgia within 3 days of leaving Iraq and were exhausted. We drove along the coast until we found a gas station that was closed for the night and parked up to eat and sleep, excited to see Georgia in the daylight. We had no idea what to expect from this new country, we had never even really heard of it until we had no-where else to go!

Have you heard of Georgia (the country, not the state)?  What would you expect?